Managing green tech complex, expensive, requires “eco-czar”

If you thought that IT and information security were massive cost centers, you ain't seen nothing yet. Get ready for carbon management—you can start by freeing up a corner office for a new executive, the Carbon Information Manager. This person will have one eye on the constantly evolving state of carbon regulation, and the other eye on the million-and-one new metrics and targets that every corner of the enterprise will have to meet. Or so says a new "Best Practices" report put out by the Carbon Disclosure Project in conjunction with IBM.

Reading through the 20-page document [PDF], it became clear to me that mounting an all-out propaganda assault on the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change will cost far less money than the added organizational overhead necessary to really cut carbon emissions. And in an odd turn, it's also clear that more regulation could make carbon management cheaper, insofar as there's just enough regulation at present to create expensive mandates, but not enough to provide the clarity in metrics and terminology that's needed to carry out those mandates. But if you're skeptical about either of these points, just take a look at the CDP report.

The report is aimed at giving corporations a big-picture look at what's involved in carbon management and at how to approach the daunting task of monitoring and reducing an entire organization's carbon footprint. The recommendations are organized into themes that encapsulate the experiences of 11 different companies that participated in the project.

The first theme is "correct definitions are vital," and under this heading the study suggests that internal use of "green" language is unhelpful to the point of counter-productivity. According to the companies that participated in the report, "green" is a great term that public relations and advertising departments can flog for eco-minded consumers, but when it comes to actually defining and describing real-world carbon management policies it's way too vague. What organizations need, claims the report, are specific terms that describe the myriad metrics that companies can use to acquire information on carbon emissions.

The vagueness of "green" terminology is largely a byproduct of the fact that the information-gathering process isn't currently defined by government regulation; so in the absence of a single set of legislatively-defined metrics, companies are left to come up with their own metrics and to label them however they like.

The eco-czar

Another theme in the report is "the emerging role of the Carbon Information Manager;" the CIM is the person who'll be managing the metrics, audits, benchmarks, milestones, reports, regulations, and internal and external relationships that make up the bigger carbon management picture.

"The role of the Carbon Information Manager involves a surprising level of detailed understanding of business operations—for example, understanding the impact of a refrigerator that isn't working properly or a pump that doesn't get maintained," the report explains. "Or appreciating the challenges of 20-year-old lighting or the spikes in emissions due to seasonal production."

Clearly, its a tough job. And equally clearly, somebody's got to do it. Or maybe make that multiple somebodies.

Though this isn't spelled out in the report, it seems pretty clear that the CIM will sit at the top of a new layer of bureaucracy, the tentacles of which will creep into every nook and cranny of corporate life, from IT to travel to facilities. Again, if you thought the IT department was intrusive... at least they're (in theory) trying to help you complete the work that you're responsible for, and not just adding extra work to please regulators.

It's quite likely that this "extra work, and for who?" factor is the key reason behind the third theme, which emphasizes C-level and board-level leadership in carbon management. In other words, the carbon stuff becomes as close to a full-fledged part of everyone's job as management can make it; of course, many organizations have been trying this same "it's part of everyone's job" approach with security, to mixed results.

In spite of its costs, carbon management is no doubt here to stay, and it seems that, in much the same way that there are some real long-term cost advantages to going green that can offset a portion of the impact of the added organizational overhead, the new businesses and jobs created by green regulation will offset at least some of carbon management's overall impact on the economy. So while the companies tasked with tackling carbon management may not be too eager to embrace the inconvenient truths contained in the CDP report, when they finally do come around they'll find a thriving cottage industry there waiting to help them along the path to compliance.